How can Pimics lead your e-commerce to success?

Running a successful online business involves being able to handle a great volume of product data in an effective and timely manner. Manually entering large sets of product data is both inefficient and error-prone.

With Pimics you can set up a products catalogue that is easy to use and easy to update, within your Business Central ERP. Want to sell to several e-commerce platforms at once? Pimics supports as many sales channels as you need and can automate product data updates to these channels, no matter if they have Sana Commerce, Shopify or Shopware as an underlying engine.

Big data volumes intake

Usually when running a webshop, you need to import a lot of product data from your vendors to your electronic catalogue, and this is where Pimics with its Vendor Catalog can really help a lot. It will handle data in a variety of formats, beginning with Excel which is probably the most widely used file format for data exchange between companies. But besides Excel, Pimics will import vendor product data from many other sources, including industry-standard file formats like BMECat and DataNorm. As described in our previous article about The BMECat advantage of Pimics, our PIM solution makes it very easy for you to import or update rich product data from vendors for large sets of SKUs, bringing BMECat catalogues within reach and making them a viable addition to your eCommerce strategy.

Product categorization

A PIM solution like Pimics makes it easy to organize your products in hierarchical categories that can be presented online in a way that is both meaningful and easy to navigate. Pimics even allows you to define multiple hierarchies according to the desired destination of your product data. Moreover, product categorization will allow you to keep your product information well organized and consistent using Pimics functionalities such as inheritance or bulk changes.
Pimics also supports industry-standard classification systems like ETIM, GS1, eCl@ss or ProfiCl@ss out-of-the-box.

Data quality

Do you need to observe certain rules when publishing your products to the Amazon marketplace? Nothing easier! Define a Pimics checklist (that you could aptly name 'Amazon') where you will specify all criteria that the product data must fulfill, and then run it over all products that you want to publish to that marketplace. Data quality management in Pimics allows you to be very flexible in the quality criteria that you impose on your product information, and allows you to always publish online products that have complete product specifications.

Digital Asset Management

Pimics gives you all the tools you need for managing your product data inside your Microsoft Dynamics Business Central ERP. This includes digital asset management (DAM) as a crucial component for enriching your product data. Yes, digital assets like product pictures, videos, or data sheets can now be managed directly from inside your ERP thanks to Pimics. 

But we don’t rely only on our in-house DAM functionality, as most PIM solutions do. Instead, we chose to add the industry-standard SharePoint document management solution from Microsoft to enable our customers to do more with the file-level information they need to attach to their SKUs. It is both a feature-rich and scalable solution that will lay a robust foundation for you to improve the way your customers perceive the products you sell online. Being able to manage all your product-related file assets from inside your PIM (and from inside your ERP) will dramatically improve your productivity and will also improve the cohesiveness of the product data on your webshop.

Direct file type conversion within SharePoint is a feature you may want to use, for easy manipulation of your product data. That way you can quickly create a PDF datasheet from a Word file that has been edited by several colleagues and approved by your vendor. Or, you can generate a lower-resolution picture from your reference product picture, for use in your webshop.

Depending on your field of activity, your organization may need to comply with various standards for data protection, data retention, or data access. That is why using Sharepoint together with your PIM takes away the headache of making a costly IT effort directed at compliance with standards such as ISO 27001, EU Model Clauses, US-EU Safe Harbor Framework, SSAE 16, FERPA, FISMA or HIPAA, for your storage infrastructure.

Metadata

When it comes to online information, metadata is hugely important for categorization, search, SEO and other reasons too. Pimics allows you to associate metadata (keywords, descriptions, etc.) with any PIM object, including digital assets. It extends the usual metadata that people associate with files, with sophisticated functionality that can condition the catalog behavior depending on the specific metadata features.

Selling on platforms like Amazon or eBay

In order to be successful in making your products stand out on any online platform and in complying with the platform’s rules for listing products, your best bet is to use a good PIM.

Among PIM solutions, Pimics is uniquely positioned to let you take advantage of the intimate ERP integration brought by our PIM-in-ERP concept. We provide direct integration with some platforms out-of-the-box, but we also provide the flexibility to painlessly add any new integration that is required. You will not only be able to provide the usual product data feed to online platforms, but also send live prices and stock availability taken first-hand from the ERP. Our connector will also take in customer orders and payments information sent from the online platform, and create documents in Business Central. This way you will have an end-to-end solution for selling on any online platform, right within your ERP.

Handling multilanguage product data

For companies, natural evolution is often synonymous with expansion, and the World Wide Web makes it easier than ever to address a global customer base. If you need to expand your geographical reach, that comes with new requirements: product data handling in multiple languages, and potentially managing separate product ranges for separate countries, with customisations for each individual market, based on legal requirements and customer preferences. Not an easy thing to do, unless you have a powerful software solution like Pimics to help you keep everything in sync and under control.

Reducing sales returns

As business builds, more online customers also means more returns on your sales. While many retailers view high returns as a necessary evil, their rate can be reduced through, among others, good product information management.

Product data plays a far more significant role for manufacturers and online retailers than what meets the eye. Because people want to know what they're buying.

Here are a few tips for you as an online seller:

• above all, represent products accurately
• check that your online photos are as descriptive and hi-quality as possible, for your customers to see clearly what they are buying from you
• always seek to have better (and consistent) product descriptions
• represent sizing correctly, where sizes are involved
• encourage customer reviews and feeback
• think about how to reward correct buyer behaviour